My Dutch Proficiency Exam (2): Oral Part

My oral exam was to take place at 4 p.m., but I took the bus at 3 o'clock, because I don't trust the T.E.C. (Transports en commun, i.e. the Walloon bus system). I had a talk with some friends who were waiting for their turn, but also with those who had just seen today's juges: Ms Evie Tops (our Proficiency teacher, who by the way wrote a PhD about the different ways of pronouncing the sound "r" in Flanders) and Mr Luk Van Mensel (who gave us pronunciation practise during the second term).

Basically, we had to be able to talk about issues discussed in the syllabus, e.g. the media in Flanders and in the Netherlands. It wasn't difficult.

The exam was pretty easy. I entered the classroom at 4 o'clock (sharp) and they made me comfortable. They asked me a couple of questions about my portfolio (a dossier we all had to made up, consisting of newsarticles, etc. and the account of things that we had done in order to be more familiar with the Dutch language outside the classroom; I had a 200+ pages portfolio, due to the Internet articles and so on). I talked about Belgian politics and stadsdichters (a kind op poet laureate for a big city such as Antwerp), too. I talked about a lot of things, but I can't remember precisely.

At the end of the exam, they told me it was good (except for a few grammatical mistakes which will disappear in the long term) and I just have to practise in order to correct my pronunciation (word stress level).